Some people have small courthouse weddings and dream of having a formal wedding celebration… and they can afford it five or ten years down the line. Since they’re already married, their formal wedding is instead of vow renewal.

On the other hand, some people want to celebrate their love surviving, some people just like to celebrate in general… and some people choose to have renewals when their relationship survives through some trial (like a near-divorce) and they want to “start over” with their marriage.

I may consider having a small vow renewal one day just to celebrate my love again. I don’t think it’d be as formal as my wedding or anything, but celebrating my love with my close friends and family sounds lovely to me.

I plan on renewing mine. I didn’t want the big wedding, I wanted a DW in the first place but DH wanted his family to be able to attend which is funny now because hardly any of them even showed up at the big wedding and those who did, left within the first hour. Plus there were so many things that went wrong on our big day, most important was pics, we just want to start it over and have better memories.

Others renew their vows because they may be about to embark a whole new journey (like parenthood) or their spouse is sick and they just want to do it. Really no couple just needs a reason. My DH and I want to renew our vows at least twice. I want one on the beach and one in Vegas on our 10 yr anniversary because that year will be pretty busy yet special (oldest daughter graduating and our other 2 won’t be far behind). We won’t be inviting anyone when we renew our vows. They didn’t show up the first time so there’s that.

Other reasons, the couple may have made a ton of mistakes and lost their way in marriage and they want to “renew” their relationship.

@figgnewton: I would renew my vows. The way I see it, it is the perfect excuse to get away together (obviously I wouldn’t have another wedding – but another vacation? I’m down!). Relationships change and evolve and I imagine our vows will too. We are writing our own and it will be interesting to see where our relationship is at in 10 years and what vows we focus on then.

Well, different couples have different reasons.My husband and I had planned a huge wedding but with finances and other issues, it was better to have a small courthouse one.

We are celebrating our 10 year anniversary with just a small thing on the beach. I know that a lot of vow renewals have all the trimmings and we are having that…just a smaller version and with just us.This decision was not taken lightly and we wanted to celebrate our 10 years with something great.

Weddings have a multitude of purposes aside from legally marrying two people. Some people consider a marriage to be not just when their paperwork was signed, but when they are in a house of religious services and they say their vows before God or whatever they believe in. Some people consider a marriage to be “real” when they say their vows in front of their nearest and dearest. And even for those who don’t care and/or do feel very satisfied with the weddings they have, sometimes they want to share their joy with other family members who may not have been able to be present on the day of their wedding.

So some couples who weren’t able to get married in a church, renew their vows in one to make it religious.

Some couples who weren’t able to get married in front of all of their families decide to do so some time later.

Some married couples may have gotten through a rocky time together – finances, infidelity, misunderstandings, a long deployment, some other difficulty – and they want to renew their vows to recommit to each other.

Some just want to celebrate a milestone – the birth of their children, or their 10th or 25th or 50th (or 1st or 7th or 12th) wedding anniversary. So they renew their vows to recommit to each other.

Renewing something doesn’t imply that they were broken or expired; when you reiterate a promise, you’re just reinforcing that you’re going to hold to it, regardless of whether you’ve broken them or not. It’s like saying “I love you” even when your partner already knows that you mean it.

And some people just want to have a big party again. To which case I say, let them be merry!

People renew their vows for a variety of reasons. Some do it to commemorate years of marriage. Others have come through a trying time in their marriage and they want to celebrate getting through that. Some couples eloped or did not have the wedding they wanted. Then there are some people who are just attention whores.

My husband and I are renewing our vows because our wedding was awful. It is also because as much as I am not close to my mother, I feel bad about hurting them by eloping. They were being too controlling and nothing I did helped, so we ran off. I would wait until ten years of marriage to renew vows but my parents will be living outside of the country by then and my mother may be dead by 2020; NOBODY lives for a long time in her family. We are renewing our vows for our fifth anniversary. My husband and I have dealt with so many problems which would have broken up many other couples. I am haunted by the terrible way our marriage started.

While our vow renewal will have many wedding elements, it is going to be intimate because that is the kind of couple my husband and I are. The cake, wedding dress, favors and ceremony are for us as well as my mother.

I know a woman who has already had TWO big weddings and she is renewing her vows for her tenth anniversary. It is going to be a huge splashy affair. She doesn’t realize that so many of her guests think she is a silly and self-indulgent woman. This woman is having her vow renewal in FLORIDA, so guests will have to take planes and get hotel rooms. I think that people would be far more understanding if she didn’t already have two big weddings; she couldn’t even afford the second one and she told people that she didn’t love her husband when she married him.